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Lee Shearer

A Madison County teacher recently was named the state’s top social studies educator. He also led the county’s other social studies teachers to a statewide award.

Madison County Middle School teacher David Kendrick won the individual award, the Gwen Hutcheson Outstanding Educator in Social Studies, and the school system’s nine social studies teachers took home the award for best social studies program.

Former University System of Georgia Chancellor Dean Propst died Monday at his North Carolina home.

Propst, 78, was chancellor during the infamous Jan Kemp trial of 1986, which laid bare a sports scandal that forced the resignation of then-University of Georgia President Fred Davison.

The former chancellor oversaw the clean-up after Kemp revealed that football players and other athletes who had flunked out of classes were being kept eligible when administrators changed their grades.

A new program for older unemployed veterans has boosted their enrollment at Athens Technical College, but time is running out for veterans to apply for the program, which pays for both college costs and some living expenses for those who qualify.

The state University System Board of Regents is set to rein in the system’s soaring private debt load when the board meets today in Atlanta.

A proposed new policy would limit the annual rent payments made by universities to 5 percent of the operating budget for the overall system, with 10 percent as the upper limit for any one school or institution.

The University of Georgia intends to pay about $2.6 million for the 660-acre farm where the famous Iron Horse sculpture sits beside Georgia Highway 15.

But the Iron Horse won’t be part of the deal. The family who owns the horse is hanging on to it for now. In legal terms, “The Grantor will reserve an access easement to a 400-square-foot property containing an iron horse statue,” according to documents the university submitted to the state Board of Regents.

UGA officials will ask the regents to approve the sale when the board meets Tuesday in Atlanta.

A crowd of about 500 turned out Friday afternoon to watch a groundbreaking ceremony for the University of Georgia’s new veterinary medicine teaching hospital.

Site preparation for the five-building complex of about 300,000 square feet will soon begin on more than 100 acres of UGA-owned land near the Kroger Shopping Center at the intersection of College Station and Barnett Shoals roads.

The new campus will be UGA’s third Athens campus, counting the main campus and the recently added Health Sciences Campus in Athens’ Normaltown neighborhood.

Craig Kennedy, a Vanderbilt University administrator, will be the next dean of the University of Georgia’s College of Education.

That leaves three dean searches still under way on the UGA campus as campus committees look for replacements for Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication Dean Cully Clark, engineering Dean Dale Threadgill, and School of Political and International Affairs Dean Thomas Lauth.